Those who had formed the chain were jubilant once they realized everybody was safe
Photograph: Roberta Ursrey

Dozens of beachgoers formed a human chain stretching almost 100 yards into the Gulf of Mexico to rescue a group of swimmers in danger of drowning after they were caught in a powerful riptide.

Six members of the same family, including a grandmother who suffered a heart attack, were among nine people passed along the chain to safety at Florida’s Panama City beach on Saturday evening.

“It was a wave of humanity that brings some things back into focus, that maybe we haven’t lost all hope in this world,” Derek Simmons, an Alabama native who quickly organised the chain and swam with his wife Jessica to rescue the stranded group, told the Guardian on Tuesday.

Simmons said he was enjoying a family picnic on the beach with his mother, wife, two nieces and one of their boyfriends when they noticed people in a group on the sands close to the pier, some pointing into the water.

“We thought it was a shark; we have a ton of those,” said Simmons, who moved with his wife to Panama City from Alabama last year.

“We walked down to see what was going on and I asked the guy furthest out if everything was OK. He said: ‘No, those people out there are drowning, I can’t get to them because the current’s too strong.’

“I said to the guy: ‘Let’s try to get as many people as we can to form a human chain.’ If you know about ants, you know when one’s in trouble they form a chain to help it. My theory was, let’s get enough people, we’ll get out there and pull them in and everybody can finish having a good rest of the evening.”

At first, he said, people appeared reluctant, fearing they would be caught in the same riptide. “We were yelling at the beach, we need more people,” he said.

Then more beachgoers raced to join the chain, allowing Simmons, 26, and his 29-year-old wife to swim further out on their body boards and reach the group, which included a young family with two small boys and the grandmother, who were attempting to keep afloat but gulping in seawater.

The couple first handed the children, Stephen Ursrey, 8, and his 11-year-old brother Noah, to the end of the chain, which by then had grown to about 80 people, and returned to help their mother Roberta, 34.

“She looked the most in trouble when we first got there,” Simmons said. “So that was the third one in, then the fourth and fifth.”

After about an hour in the water, he said, they were exhausted but able to rescue the last of the group, a nephew of the Ursrey family and an unidentified couple. The most difficult to help was Roberta Ursrey’s 67-year-old mother, who suffered a heart attack in the water and was “lifeless” according to Simmons.

In a posting accompanying a GoFundMe appeal for help with medical bills, Roberta Ursrey said her mother was in stable condition in the intensive care unit of the Gulf Coast regional medical centre.

“She died on us for a few minutes [in the water],” Ursrey wrote. “My dad passed in December and when my mom came around she told us she had seen my daddy and it wasn’t her time yet. So she came back to us.”

She added that the rescued group contained two or three others who tried to help when they saw her sons in difficulties but then became stranded themselves.

“The tide was very strong; nothing we did let us get out of it,” she wrote. She told the North-West Florida Daily News the family’s rescuers were “God’s angels that were in the right place at the right time. Without them we wouldn’t be here,” she said.

Valerie Sale, the public information officer for Bay County, said lifeguards on Panama City beach during the day had finished for the evening when the rescue occurred, but county emergency medical personnel and two ambulances helped those pulled from the water.

“There were yellow caution flags flying on the beach but unfortunately, despite our best efforts at education, people don’t always know what the flags mean,” she said.

“This turned out a heck of a lot better than it could have done. It’s amazing that people banded together to do this.”

Simmons said he and his wife saw flashing lights on the boardwalk but there was no assistance from authorities during the rescue.

“From what we were told, they were instructed to stay on the beach because there was a boat on the way, but we were in the water for almost an hour and there was no boat,” he said.

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A spokesman for the Panama Beach police department said two of its officers were present throughout and were trying to prevent people from entering the water, fearing they would also become caught in the current. He said a rescue boat was ordered from wildlife authorities but did not reach the scene in time.

Simmons said those who had formed the chain were jubilant once they realized everybody was safe. “It was pretty amazing, all these different people, complete strangers who didn’t even know each other’s names, hugging and high-fiving.

“I’ve seen reports saying that Jessica and I were the heroes out there but that’s not true – everybody that was involved, they’re heroes. Had we not had an anchor or a chain we wouldn’t have been able to bring people in the way that we did.

“I come from a place where you help out your neighbour. My only thing is I would hope if I was in that position someone would do the same for me.”